Startup’s Guide to Effective Website Planning

Building a website for your startup is one of the most exciting exercise. In today’s connected world, website serves as primary communication point for your startup.

But, there are just too many choices available, and this leads to confusion. Few providers claim to offer website as little as Rs. 2500 (<$40), while few insist for, easy to use, Do It Yourself type of sites, which are monthly charged, to few people who charges like $2.5K for a single website. Besides price, php, asp, cloud, html, hosting, cms etc. jargon.

If you are looking to have clear website plan for your startup, this article is for you.

Before thinking out of the box, Define the box first.

As you are looking for a website (typically a startup corporate website), lets get few things clear.

Website is set of inter-related services working together. Failure in any of these service can take your website offline, or in popular word “Website is DOWN”.

Website is representation of your business, over the great World Wide Web.

Every website is unique, just like your business. The extend of uniqueness, differs, as per requirement.

Now the details of each aspect.

Domain Name

It is the unique name/identifier of your website, but it is not all about your website. Domain names are to be registered with international regulatory body ICANN, via network of its ICANN accredited registrars & it’s resellers. Domains can be registered on yearly basis, common slabs include, from 1 year to maximum 10 years.

Web Hosting

Website is set of inter-related files, working together to deliver an experience in visitor’s browser. As we store our regular files on Harddisk of PC, Pen drives or CD-DVDs, we need a place to keep the website files. Also that place needs to be connected to internet 24 x 7. It cannot be our standard desktop or laptop system in this case.

Web Server is a high capacity and performance computer which is connected to very high speed internet. As server is of very high capacity, a standard corporate website cannot always utilize the whole capacity of that server. Also it will be expensive to operate a server for a small website (here I am referring to website less than 1GB of total size).

Instead of operating/leasing/owning a server, its advisable to lease a small fraction of server storage for our websites. This can be purchased as per hour basis (in case of cloud hosting) to per day, per month or per year basis. This is a basic idea of Shared hosting. Which is recommended for small, not much interactive websites.

If you want to operate a resource rich website like, video collection, eCommerce, social network etc, standard shared hosting will not be sufficient. In that case, one should look for Virtual Private Servers (VPS) hosting, or Cloud hosting. These choices are more of technology & market driven.

Web hosting cost, for a standard corporate/agency/startup website can be monthly or yearly recurring.

Pro Tip – Web hosting services can be based on various different technologies. Discuss with your website developer before purchasing/finalizing web hosting. There could be incompatibility issues.

The WEBSITE itself

Building a website, is not simply a task that can be completely outsourced to some agency/individual.

Website is representation of your business on Internet. You need to finalize how that representation will be. The information to be shared, images, facts, details, technical descriptions etc. has to be compiled by client (by You).

Also check the websites similar to your business.

Finally its you who knows your business well, you can describe, justify & differentiate it effectively than anyone else…

Get your team involved in the exercise of requirement planning, design confirmation & content creation.

Do not try to copy, or get influenced by existing websites which are not in your core field of business. Consult with your web designers, developers (or with us)
e.g. an attractive video based website can be great for a performer, but cannot be effective for a travel agency.

“Responsive” is a buzzword right now. Responsive website layout, adapts itself to various devices of different sizes e.g. Mobiles, Tablets, Normal screens, Very large screens etc.

Pro Tip – Insist your Web Designer & Developer to have Responsive Website. It is almost like unwritten rule now a days.